Main Junction: [Sticky] ASK WHITECHAPEL -- the You Can Haz Help Now thread

I usually drink it plain but on occasion I'll add almond milk and some honey. Coffee is the reverse - I love it with milk & sugar (or half & half and sugar) and that tends to offend most of my coffee friends.

When I stayed with my wife's family in Aurich, Germany for a while, I learned how to drink strong 'broken silver' tea Ostfriesen-style - strong as hell, with rock-sugar lumps, and cream. Ostfriesen tea is really too strong and bitter to be drunk straight - I say this as a former coffee shop worker who loves espresso straight. Since then, I've gone on to pretty much drink it 'builder's tea' style, when I can't get rock sugar ('kluntjes').

My other favorite tea is lapsang souchong, and again...really not meant to be drunk straight. I love the appeal of the purity of drinking the pure product, but the smoky flavor really doesn't open up without milk and sugar.

Okay, I've deleted the temporary internet files and all cookies, then restarted my machine and tried to log on to Photobucket; still nothing except blank boxes where images and buttons should be. Is the new site incompatable with Windows 7, perhaps?

Things are still a bit raw with my ex, we've had to delete each other from social media because the evidence of one of us having fun turns the other to misery. BUT - We started off as best friends, and despite the odds, would want to one day be able to be friends again. But that's not going to happen if we completly cut off contact with each other (also living in different places now).

So I proposed the idea of some sorta two-player turn-based email/post/website game/art-challenge. Something where we don't have to talk about our personal lives until we finally feel comfortable.

I've searched around for the right activity but come up blank, there's game-by-post chess/strategy/rpg eItc but really something les technical and competitive and more fun and creative is what I'm looking for.

I know the whole thing is a long-shot doomed to failure but I've got to try something, instead of just sitting back and letting us turn into strangers.

Any ideas?

TL;DR Fun, creative, uncomplicated correspondence game for two people who take turns that can last from a minute to a month.

The best Earl Grey I've had (and, come to think of it, one of the better cups of tea I've drunk) was in the café of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It was quite a few years ago, but it might be worth sampling if anyone happens to be visiting. The Hollish may know more about tea than is generally imagined. And there's the paintings, of course.

#artbypost

I wonder if some variation of Exquisite Corpse might fit the bill? Also, the Mail Art movement might provide some tangential inspiration.

I'm going to be pitching my work to galleries in the new year, and I need a website where I can display my art. I've decided to teach myself Web design and build myself a site from scratch, and I'm not sure where to start. Any advice on website building and hosting would be much appreciated.

Also: #PitchingYourShit

Does anyone have any general advice on promoting yourself with gallery owners (other than "Network!")? I understand there are a few faux pas which are considered extremely rude (ie walking in unannounced with a painting under your arm), and I'd prefer not to commit any of them.

If you're a complete beginner, then one of those "Web Design for Dummies", or "Learn HTML in 24 hours" books is a great way to show you the basics of how to build a website. You can then move on to online resources that will teach you how to build a good website.

Your ISP may provide you with some hosting space along with your account - although I believe that's rarer these days than it used to be. But if your ultimate aim is setting up a professional looking site you'll probably need to pay for proper hosting. You can get ridiculously cheap hosting in the US, and point a local web address at it with no problems (I seem to recall you're a fellow Aussie, right?).

.au domain names can generally be had for about $99.00 a year. If it's a .com.au you're after you'll need to provide an ABN and a justification as to what the domain name has to do with your business. If the domain is based on your personal name or registered business name then it's no problem, although I can't say I've ever heard of any name ever being knocked back.

No worries. When you've got the basics down htmldog is a pretty good reference, and the W3C validators (HTML, CSS) are great tools for showing you everything you did wrong. If you're a Firefox user, the Web Developer toolbar is a godsend.

Heh, never noticed it before but htmldog has tutorials. Depending on how you learn they might be better (and more convenient) than the books.

I had a portfolio site for a few years, and I'd recommend Kompozer to get you started. Do something simple with the wysiwyg interface, swap over to html to see what it looks like, rinse and repeat. That and a decent online tutorial and you're laughing. And it's free, which is always nice.

We had a visiting artist at my old college that said he went in and told galleries something like, "I was wondering if you know any galleries in the area that might be interested in showing my work." He figured he wouldn't ask them to actually show the work themselves, due to that being a bad first impression. But he noted their reaction upon seeing it, making note of the ones that seemed to like it. Everyone told him to go to one particular place, which wound up being his main gallery. I think he had to go see the gallery owner on his deathbed or something.

This is just the most memorable answer to this question I remember hearing. I would say, ask whoever is working how people get shown there. Every place is a little different. And if you know anyone who's shown somewhere you'd like to be shown, ask them how they managed it. Be sure to look and see what sort of art the galleries show. If they show stuff that is similar to what you want to show, you'll be more likely to get a yes. Medium is less important than the context and dialogue in art you're responding to, I'd say.

A definite long-shot, especially this late in the day, but can any of you recommend somewhere Stateside, the closer to Ohio the better (but not essential), who can print & bind something in a hardback novel-style format in time to for it to get to someone, also in the US, before Christmas?

I think what I'm looking for falls within the "vanity" range. It's approximately 95K words and I'd have to be able to email the document to them and would only need two copies, max.

I'm planning to make a webcomic with a friend, hopefully starting sometime next year. We feel like we have a good, original idea, and I'll do the art for her scripts. Thing is - I've been doing abstract mixed media almost exclusively for 15 years, and have been struggling at improving my realistic drawing for about a year now. My mixed media work is good, but no one's buying it, and the thought of working the gallery scene makes me want to hide under the bed. I've loved comics since... since my earliest memories, so the thought of telling stories with my brilliant friend feels like home; thus the career redirection. I know I'll suck at it for a while, and am trying not to be depressed about being bad at art again. I've been bad at it before, and got better, so presumably can do so again. And I still have all the aesthetic knowledge I've built over the years to help me along.

To the point, I can't afford to go back to school for sequential art classes, so was wondering if y'all could direct me to some good self-education resources - books, websites, instructional videos, anything to help me train myself in panel composition, drawing characters consistently, working with color in Photoshop, etc. including all those things I need to know but haven't even though of yet. I can draw well enough that the subject is identifiable as itself, so I'm not starting from scratch, but I've still got a lot of work to do before it looks beautiful or professional. It seems so far that my biggest specific hurdle is going to be making characters look like themselves at all angles. Any help would be awesome, because my friend and I are going to do this foolish thing whether I'm ready or not.

#teajack

I like my tea black to the point of being nearly opaque, with a preference for Earl Grey and Pu-erh. As to ritual, ever since I was a kid, I've poured the hot water, then slowly lowered the teabag in so that darkness would pool only at the very bottom of the mug until it looked ready to stir up and drink. It's oddly soothing to do it that way. I used to add sugar, but haven't in a long time; sweet tea now tastes very strange.